Learning Disabled and Normal Children's Responses to Requests for Clarification Which Vary in Explicitness.

Pearl, Ruth A.; And Others

The study involving 67 learning disabled (LD) children (grades 1 through 8) was designed to track the developmental course of the understanding of the more subtle forms of feedback (i.e., facial expression), to examine LD children's understanding of nonexplicit requests for clarification relative to that of normal achieving children, and to explore how individual differences in children's understanding of conversational rules may be related to measures of the more general perceptions. Children's locus of control was identified using the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility scale and the Crandall scale, and children's understanding of different types of feedback was examined via the classic referential communication task requiring the child to describe each of a series of abstract figures to an adult female experimenter so that she could find the picture being described from a large array of the same pictures. Results indicated that whether children respond to requests for clarification is related both to their personal characteristics and to the explicitness of the feedback. The prediction that LD children would be less responsive to facial feedback than control children was confirmed only for young LD girls. (SBH)